When Anna Molka Ahmed began to establish the Fine Arts Department of the Punjab University, she had just turned 23. She started on the June 1st, 1940, and as she gazed around at Lahore Museum, she confided to her journal that she felt she had entered pages of history. Her vocation in art had always been a struggle. She was a scholarship student at St. Martins School, London, against her father’s wishes and compromised by taking design as a subject instead of fine art as she longed to do. On winning a much coveted scholarship for advance studies at the Royal College of Arts, she forged her father’s signature on her papers to avoid his wrath. Eventually he had to be told, and Anna described her mother as a ‘buffer zone between two warring factors’. Hence, she had her way and joined the college where she was an outstanding student. Anna met Sheikh Ahmed, a senior scholarship student studying at the Central School of Art, London, and the two fell passionately in love, and in 1939, they married and sailed to Bombay en route to Amritsar where Sheikh’s family resided. Anna’s initial feelings were mixed, her idea of India had been based on the Moghal miniature paintings seen in the British Museum, an influence that was seen in her own work at that time. She was initially very disappointed with her surroundings but even then, noted the brilliant colours of rustic areas, the earth, organic plants and trees reflected in the light of the sun. As a teacher, she was the first to take her students out to open their eyes to nature and the beauty of their surroundings and they were regularly seen in Shalimar Gardens, the Canal Road – very quiet in those days, and villages on the outskirts of Lahore.
		From 1940 till her death in 1994, the focus of her life was art education in the country. After Partition, she was left with only six of the 200 students the department had nurtured and set to work to build up the department again. Initially for girls only, she fought to raise the standard of art education to a master’s degree and to allow admission to male students. Both these issues were resolved in the mid- fifties, and she focused on creating art teachers to propagate art education throughout Pakistan. This was an ambition fulfilled before her death. When ill health forced Anna Molka to relinquish painting, she wrote colourfully expressive poems describing her feelings as clearly as her paintings. One of the poems she titled, ‘The Sick Artist’, and a line from that verse inspired a book on her life and times: Orange and Blue! /Yellow and Mauve! / Green and Red! But I am in bed! The sun blazes the colours through my window! / A Glory But I lie inert with a broken thigh. (Anna Molka Ahmed, 1992)